It might sound weird, but nowadays YouTube is becoming a brand new kind of glue which keeps society linked together. This can be explained not only because digital content can be streamed of downloaded everywhere, but also because, as for now, YouTube’s audiovisual language, Facebook’s way of understanding friendship, or Twitter’s short, accurate style of writing are part of our cultural background.

miércoles, 9 de noviembre de 2011

Story-boarding, alias my personal highway to hell

Next stage of the project: drawing the story board (since writing a traditional script was out of the question as there is scarcely going to be any dialogues), setting the production schedule and finding actors and locations. I don't know if any of you has ever drawed a story board or anything similar. It might sound fun, it might sound easy, it might sound like “oh, yes, let’s create our own comic and be innovative and blahblahblah”, but I can assure you, out of experience, that it’s no trifle. However, Laura and I spent a whole afternoon disclosing, cut by cut, camera position by camera position, perspective by perspective each and every single scene of the short film. Well, I can't say we made an artistic masterpiece, but it will do for our purposes.

As for the production plan, we designed an utopist-impossible schedule that we have already betrayed due to technical problems (to get it straight, I broke my foot during the Enrichment Week). Luckily we already have one of the flashback-teasers more or less edited with music and typography and we are working on the second one, whose images we intend to shoot during this week. The idea is to release all the teasers before December, but we don’t know if we are going to be able to do that, since our actors keep on letting us down. Although I don’t want to give a full description of the teasers, I’m going to disclose the soundtrack of the three of them, a great, powerful song by Noisia remixed by three different DJ’S: Noisia: Machine Gun. The first of the teasers is going to tell us the thrilling story of the older sister, an insomniac girl who never had innocence or even a proper childhood. The aesthetics, as I had already foreseen, is going to be a mix of the brainstorming of Requiem for a dream and the literary rythm of Dakota, in order to achieve great contrast between the silent, calmed table scene and the uneasy flashbacks. Next week I'll be talking about the content of the second of the teasers.

And then it comes the hardest part: finding actors and locations. Well, we are not so ambitious and smug about our project to use professional actors, so our amateur friends will do. We have Irene for the oldest daughter, myself for the second daughter (how narcissist is that?), and Alejandro (provisionally) as the son. But what about the grandparents, all wrinkled and old and decrepit? Apparently, some camera tricks and good make up (YouTube tutorials will never be so useful) will do. Grandmother: Ana. Grandfather: Eduardo. However, we still needed a cozy kitchen, and I've never seen anything as far of the idea of cozyness as our hospital-like kitchens. No need to worry, we have also solved that problem appealing to the most ancient resource ever: friends and their homes.

And that's it. What's left now is taking the camera, the tripod and...lights, camera, action!